Category: people

In response to her recent campaign on behalf of Gurkha soldiers in the UK, Nepalis declared Lumley – one of British television’s most familiar faces (Americans know her as AbFab‘s Patsy) – a minor Hindu goddess and named a mountain for her. Says she: “I don’t think I’m much of a god, because I don’t have the good snappy nature that would throw a thunderbolt.”

“His images often fell on the hallucinatory side of visionary and could be confrontational, even repellent: synagogue lamps scintillating with light, translucent spirits evoked in séances, disemboweled bodies on autopsy tables. His paintings were hard to love, but they are not easily forgotten.”

After decades teaching at New England Conservatory and playing close to home, “[by] the mid-’90s Mr. Maneri, a round, cheery, charismatic presence with a snow-white beard, was regarded as a musician ahead of his time, a forerunner of the exploratory, eclectic improvised music then flourishing as ‘downtown’ jazz.”

“[His] restless artistic temperament led him to explore a variety of styles and media, shuttling between realism and abstraction. He produced narrative paintings like Incident at Walden Pond, a triptych from the late 1970s depicting the aftermath of a rape, and, beginning in the 1990s, abstract landscapes based on his own vascular system and on [medieval] Chinese landscapes.”

“If given a chance to eat lunch with one of four prominent Downtowners, people overwhelmingly would choose L.A. Opera’s Plácido Domingo. At least, respondents to a recent online Los Angeles Downtown News poll did.” Domingo won big with 66% of respondents; poor L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa got 6%.

“By and large, talent is in such short supply that mediocrity can be taken for brilliance rather more than genius can go undiscovered.”

“Members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic came by the box to greet him. He was ushered to the head of the line of well-wishers backstage at intermission to visit with Ma, who happened to have been a Juilliard classmate of Ayers. They hugged, even though, Ayers told me, Ma was quite sweaty.”

“The most famous fish story on Broadway reached its conclusion on Thursday after an arbitrator found that Jeremy Piven did not violate his contract when he withdrew from the revival of Speed-the-Plow, citing a case of mercury poisoning.”

The Booker Prize-winning novelist “slammed Scotland’s literary scene,” saying that “if the country were in charge of awarding the Nobel prize instead of Sweden, it would go to ‘a writer of f***ing detective fiction’ or a book about ‘some upper middle-class young magician’.”